


Demon at Midnight

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, Lullabies, Spring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-14 19:55:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18483268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: Sleepy nanny Crowley after Warlock has gone to bed.(I tried to write this as a poem in the style of the Greater Romantic Lyric- this did not work. It is in prose.)





	Demon at Midnight

The room wasn’t dark. A soft orange glow, far softer than fire suffused the little space. Warm spring air, palpably humid seeped through the window, the green of the questionably tended garden beyond offset by fairy lights. Looking around the room it was clear there had been influences beyond what what the American Cultural Attaché had intended. It was cluttered, whimsical, slightly macabre and profoundly safe. A miasma of care was woven into the atmosphere. 

Warlock Dowling’s nanny had finished singing. Her song was a comfort. Eerie, messy and her own.

Her hope lay sleeping, and for the first time in a long, long while the serpent of Eden relaxed.

Somewhere in the sight of her, inexplicably curled up in a straight-backed chair, wearing dark glasses, long limbs swallowed in an old wool dress- anyone warm-blooded would have been sweating- there was the impression of a snake coiling up more comfortably, a tension in its movements that was never going to go away. 

She wasn’t sleeping, just slowed down in the warmth of the room, considering returning to the angel down the hall who sat up all night reading. 

Perhaps life in the gap between now and the end wasn’t so bad. Hadn’t they always been living in the gap between now and the end? The only difference was that these days they could see the oncoming train at the end of the tunnel.

But their plan was going well. She was hopeful.

The angel had sung her to sleep once, sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire. Mostly meaningless syllables, lalla, lalla, giving way to memories of sunlight when the world was new.

Remember the days

Of wind in your wings

Mirage and haze

The beginning of things

He’d never quite grasped the darkness of lullabies, their forward-looking quality or their tendency to be murder ballads. The serpent had woken up five years later and found he had sold off her all her trading ships. 

Perhaps Warlock would live to adulthood. Perhaps they really had bought them all another few millennia. Perhaps decades from now a nanny encouraging destruction and a gardener praising kindness would be a distant memory. Perhaps Warlock would be doing something wonderfully, horribly human. Perhaps there would be a “decades from now.” Perhaps the clocks of the universe would keep ticking.

It was a good thought.


End file.
